Readers loved The Onion’s 9/11 issue, even though it wasn’t that funny

Agreed. It was pitch perfect, a truly remarkable achievement, up there with LIFE‘s November 29, 1963 issue, which was a normal number literally on its way to the presses on Friday the 22nd, and which had to be junked, rewritten and redesigned from scratch (well, mostly — they left in some weird stuff…) then printed as quickly as humanly possible — before Photoshop, fax machines, word processors, PageMaker… not to mention the internet. It was mostly done with glue and booze.

On September 10, 2001, employees of the satirical national newspaper, The Onion, gathered at the Bowery Ballroom on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for a party to celebrate their first New York issue, which was due to be published the next day…